The Past is Another Country is a series of interviews with individuals distinguished for their contributions to culture and to society. In addition to discussing their individual contributions, the programmes explore the context in which each of them functioned. The interviews, by Rajiva Wijesinha, cover a range of developments in post-independence Sri Lanka, and present a panoramic view of social change in the latter half of the 20th century.

Derrick Nugawela’s parents belonged to the Nugawela and Panabokke families, distinguished landowners in Kandy and successful politicians in Colombo during the State Council period, and thereafter in the early years after independence. He himself however, after the early death of his father, had to make his own way, and became a planter, where he had to work himself up in a profession dominated by British expatriates. By the sixties he ran one of the best plantations in Sri Lanka, while also being a Volunteer Officer who was put in charge of Hambantota during the 1971 insurgency. Having later emigrated to Australia, he had to again make his own way there, before returning to Sri Lanka for Citibank, and later becoming a Director of the Board of Investment.

For there were also days of immense joy and tranquility at Alu. I have never found Colombo congenial, and from childhood on I would spend weeks during vacations with friends and relations who lived outside the capital. My favourite refuge was the Old Place in Kurunegala, but I also spent many happy holidays with W J Fernando when he was Government Agent in Kandy. There had also been one or two stays with Hope Todd, also in Kandy, before he moved to Colombo, and afterwards, when he went back there on work and stayed in the little house in Reeves Gardens which he continued to maintain. Memorable too were a couple of long stays with Derrick Nugawela on his estate in Bogowantalawa.

By the time I came back from Oxford however all that had changed, with Derrick in Australia and Hope and WJ firmly settled in Colombo. My aunt Lakshmi still continued at Old Place for a few years more, and I stayed there frequently, but the place was clearly on its last legs. That in itself did not really matter much, for I was quite content to do nothing all day except write, just as I had done nothing all day as a schoolboy except read. But what did matter was that Lakshmi and I did not have very much to say to each other. In the old days we had discussed books, and she had provided me with lots of exciting modern stuff to read, but by the eighties she was not reading very much, and we had less to say to each other about books and writers.

I heard the news of Leo’s death while I was in Denmark, on my way to England in an odyssey that saw me visit seven countries after my Advanced Levels in Madras, before I finally got to London. It was probably the best place and time to hear something so upsetting, for I had seen the most exciting places, lots of antiquities and art in Greece and Italy, and then exotically Prague too by road from Frankfurt, and I was exhausted. Our Danish friends were about the most comforting to stay with, and I could collapse in a home, with just the occasional visit to a museum. The frenetic activity I had engaged in over the previous weeks had tailed off, and I was ready again for domesticity and being looked after.

I went away the day I got the letter to a very minor museum and sat in the garden and grieved. The death was a shock, but not a surprise, for I had long known that the way of life I had enjoyed so much at Kurunagala was staggering to a close. Through the sixties we had seen service more difficult to obtain, the army that had cooked and cleaned for Lakshmi and Leo diminishing over the years. The food too had grown less extravagant, in part because there were fewer people to help prepare it, but also because Lakshmi had decided to take Leo’s diet in hand after he first had heart problems. Long gone then were the luscious chops and rich desserts that had made Old Place a gourmet’s delight in the early years of the decade.